Ramblings of an Emergency Physician in Texas

NAVAL STATION ROTA, Spain ? The first sick Marines arrived aboard the ship from Liberia with their skin riddled with mosquito bites. They became so ill that doctors planned to fly them hundreds of miles away to Germany for more care.

That night, 15 more Marines arrived on the USS Iwo Jima. Some had high fevers and high blood pressure. Many were throwing up and had severe diarrhea. By the next day, 31 Marines were seriously ill and nobody knew why.
…
One-third of the people sent to the West African country came down with malaria, according to the Pentagon. Eighty of the 200 Navy, Marine Corps and Department of Defense personnel developed a strain of malaria that kills 25 percent of its victims.

Something I didn’t hammer enough in my earier post on this subject was that antimalarial medications aren’t the only thing that needs to be done to keep the troops healthy. One of the commenters to that post pointed out that the mosquitoes cannot land to infect in even the slightest breezes, making fans a necessity, not a luxury.

Also, DEET, sleeves down, that sort of thing also need to be done. If your people are covered in bites, you’re not getting the job done.

Pill may cut hearing loss from noise
This is a long MSNC article about an anti-oxidant medication (which will be in a liquid form, not a pill when tested). The researchers hope it will help diminish, or even prevent, noise induced hearing loss.
You need a lot of pre-arranged noise to test this sort of thing, and for statistical power you need a lot of subjects. So,

STARTING IN a few months, a group of 600 Marines at Camp Pendleton in California will face rifle training with not only foam plugs in their ears, but also a drink that tastes very much like Wild Berry Zinger herbal tea.
They?ll take it with every meal during their two weeks of the noisy training, an experience that normally erodes a bit of hearing ability from about 10 percent of trainees. And if all goes as hoped, hearing tests will show that a substance dissolved in the drink made a difference.

I want to know other things from this, like are their sick-call rates changed from cohorts?